I think having an algorithmic feed resonates with people a hell of a lot more, certainly drove early adopters.

Censorship resonates with a large number of people! Great! We are building for everyone else.

I don’t *think* it will necessarily become properly decentralized, but rather that it totally *could* and they are working toward it (whether they run out of resources before they get there I dunno), thus I think dismissing Bluesky as “not decentralized, next” is naive.

But I can tell you for sure there the “custom feeds” feature, at a minimum, led to substantial early adopter/evangelist momentum. To a much lesser extent the decentralized labeling/moderation/censorship feature as well.

Even if they didn’t drive material user adoption, they’re cool features we should be learning from, not dismissing the whole thing “because it’s not decentralized”.

To be honest I have no idea of what this discussion is about anymore. If you stated the parts on which you agreed with me it would ease my confusion -- but I'll try to clarify now:

I guess I can say that (1) we both agree Bluesky is not decentralized today; (2) you think it can be decentralized if and when more people start running more BGS and AppViews, I don't think that will happen and even if it does it will be inconsequential; (3) you think Bluesky has some cool features like custom feeds and I agree; (4) you think Bluesky is getting really big because of these cool features and I think they play a very minor role in their growth.

Good summary?

You also seem to think Nostr is broken in many ways and not innovating enough, but these points are vague to me. I would like to know what cool features could or should be added to Nostr and what is more broken so we can try to fix.

And you are reading only parts of my posts and responding to those parts as if I hadn't said anything else.

No, they are not. The entire idea of Nostr as a censorship-resistant thing was always that clients would connect directly to the original source of events as decided by the publisher, so if I follow you and you decide to publish only to relay.bitcoin.ninja then my client should connect to that server directly and fetch your notes.

They have said over and over (maybe not in these words) that they think it's essential for apps to have a "guarantee" that they have seen all -- i.e. that users have read all that was written to them, or by someone, or with some tag etc -- that implies that the entire ecosystem of apps should rely on a single "relay". Their architecture diagrams also depict all the pieces talking to a single relay, their codebases all point to a single relay. There is no provision anywhere for an app that uses two or more relays.

Of course they will say it is possible for others to run alternative relays, and they want that only insofar as it will validate their idea of decentralization, but the truth is that if someone is running an alternative relay they will not be able to use any of existing online infrastructure -- they will have to run alternative versions of everything configured to point to the new relay URL.

If someone is running a relay today it's probably for hobby purposes, maybe not indexing the full network, someone trying to make their closed little sandbox of atproto, I don't know, a serious relay is already hard to run today, should get increasingly harder and virtually impossibly hard if Bluesky achieves its world domination plans.

The comment about relay being an optimization was somewhat nitpicky, you’re just using the wrong term (technically the relay is a proxy between all the PDs’ and the app view, the app view stores all the posts too and you could drop the relay and replace it with the app view(s) connecting to all the PDSs directly).

The “App View” is a server that returns the posts to display in the feed to clients (eg the mobile app). In practice the App View is what *has* to have a full copy of all the tweets, much like a nostr relay works in practice today.

Clients simply making the same request to multiple App Views wouldn’t result in having to rewrite or throw anything away, I have no idea why you’re suggesting that - in general you’ll get the same response from each, just have to merge them on the client side.

What, an "optimization"? Are you suggesting that Bluesky would work today without the optimization, just slightly slower? Or what do you mean by that?

If your information isn't out of the date you probably know that nothing of Bluesky works without the "relay". And sure, you can argue, as you have elsewhere, that Bluesky can change to actually connect directly to PDSes, but then you will need to trash all the labelers, feed generators and app views and the client app codebases, as they all assume the existence of the "relay", and then you'll have to create a query language for the PDSes and proceed to recreate all of these things on the clients directly -- and then obviously you would have just created Nostr again (and then you have to start working on the same problems Nostr has been working on for the past years).

If that ever happens then great, we don't need Nostr anymore -- but if you are indeed following Bluesky you have probably read directly from the Bluesky creators that they do not intend to do any of this decentralized data-fetching stuff ever because they think it is a bad idea to not have a canonical centralized source of data, it's an irreconciliable divide and no "progress towards decentralization" can be expected from them, at least not decentralization in the way we understand it.

Yes, there will probably be only a few big world relays, just like there are only a few search engines. The difference is you can verify when relays are censoring which will incentivize them to be as neutral as possible, as long as there is one relay that is a good actor. It's actually very analogous to Bitcoin mining pools. Economics forces only a handful to exist, but as long as there is one transparent and fair option ( Ocean ), then the others can't collude as the switching cost is low due to the open nature of the protocol. It's the same with AppViews. This is all theoretical of course, time will tell.

Cool, I can totally get behind that.

When you say “we should learn from BlueSky”, do you mean ppl focused on Nostr?

If no, then I’m lost on your point.

If yes, what specifically do you think BlueSky is doing right *as a protocol* that Nostr is doing wrong or worse? And specifically curious in the BlueSky “decentralized features” you mentioned.

Thanks

Yes. An article says X is moving there. Say don lemon or whoever.

35k people see that, talk with some friends, now it's 50k people. 1k people go sign up and then post on x or IG or threads.

An article about 1 person going there draws a thousand or more new signups.

I've been in news media and marketing my whole career life. 25 years now I am not confusing anything.

If there is only one central data source, then it would seem the benefit of having may independent data relays is only relevant in niche censorship scenarios. Lmk if I’m missing something

Most users flock to and put up with a whole lotta shit on social media because their friends on on it. So I 100% do not agree with this.

It's not some PR. It's been mentioned everywhere, and celebrities have said they areoving to it. Google trends for it is through the roof since the election.

Sorry, the second question was meant to be more…

How do they play to add more redundancy in the data servers, and in that future state how would they handle it if the ‘top’ server went down?

nostr needs maybe a couple thousand dollars a month to keep the lights on. Clients already exist and running relays is insanely cheap. Damus will keep working even money runs out. You can’t say the same about bluesky

Wasn't BlueSky just another neutered Mastodon instance like Gab, but woth a mich shittier userbase?

This is the nature of the game. Those that align with the establishment will always be better funded, more popular, highly praised, shielded from risk, spared from failure.

But they will also never have the freedom to oppose the establishment. How's their payment mechanism going? They took Bitcoin VC, and also refuse to actually use Bitcoin.

"In war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak."

> The Series A funding round was led by Blockchain Capital, a venture firm that has invested in OpenSea, Kraken, and Coinbase. Several other crypto-related venture firms—including SevenX, True Ventures and Alumni Ventures—participated in the funding round, as well.

> Nonetheless, the social media startup vowed that it would not “hyperfinancialize” the Bluesky “social experience” by integrating crypto tokens, NFTs, or other blockchain-based technology into its platform.